WASHINGTON - Civil-liberties advocates and Democrats hailed Monday's
resignation by US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a major victory, while
most Republicans, for whom Gonzales' performance had increasingly become a
source of embarrassment, kept their comments to a minimum.
Gonzales, a longtime crony of President George W Bush and the first Hispanic to
hold a senior federal US cabinet post, served as one of the key backers - both
as White House counsel during Bush's first term and as the country's chief
law-enforcement
officer since January 2005 - as one of the key promoters of the
administration's claims to sweeping executive powers after September 11, 2001,
as part of the "war on terror".
Some analysts said his departure may result in a softening of some of the
administration's more controversial policies, including the use by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) of extreme interrogation methods against terrorist
suspects, such as "waterboarding", that Gonzales had long defended.
"History will remember Gonzales as the man who never said no to torture and
detention policies that violated US and international law," said Kenneth Roth,
the executive director of Human Rights Watch.
Roth argued that Gonzales' departure should galvanize a full-scale
investigation of US detention policies during his tenure as both White House
counsel and attorney general.
"This removes an important protector of the more-Kafkaesque features of this
administration," said Stephen Clemons, a political insider at the New America
Foundation. "Much depends now on who takes his place, but this could be serious
blow to the Cheney gang," he added in a reference to Gonzales' backing for
hardline positions regarding prisoner detention and related issues advocated by
Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Indeed, Gonzales' announcement sparked widespread speculation over his possible
successor, with Democrats suggesting they are unlikely to confirm anyone whose
independence from the White House is in doubt.
"It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general
has done the right thing and stepped down ... We Democrats implore you [Bush]
to work with us," said Senator Charles Schumer, who has led Democratic efforts
to press Gonzales to resign. "Don't choose the path of confrontation and throw
down the gauntlet - we are willing to meet you in the middle of the road. All
we ask is that you choose somebody who puts the rule of law first. We're not
looking for confrontation here."
Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary
Committee, who became one of Gonzales' strongest critics on Capitol Hill, said:
"There has to be somebody with very solid professional qualifications, somebody
who's an experienced lawyer and has demonstrated the kind of judgment that the
attorney general is called upon to display."
Among the major candidates mentioned to date are the head of the Department of
Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff; former deputy attorney general Larry
Thompson; former Republican congressman Christopher Cox, who currently heads
the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, who
charged on Monday that Gonzales had been the victim of "absurd political
theater".
Gonzales' resignation follows the announcement just two weeks ago that Bush's
top political adviser since the 1990s, Karl Rove, was also leaving his White
House post effective at the end of this month. Rove's announcement, in turn,
followed the resignation in July of another of Bush's closest and most trusted
aides, White House counselor Dan Bartlett.
Both Rove's and Gonzales' resignations line up with reports that White House
Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten had told senior White House staffers that if they
choose to stay in the administration past the US Labor Day, which falls on
September 3 this year, they will be expected to remain through the end of
Bush's presidential term.
Both Rove and Gonzales were targeted by ongoing Democratic-led investigations
into the sacking - apparently because they were insufficiently zealous in
implementing Rove's instructions for partisan purposes - of nine federal
prosecutors late last year.
Gonzales' testimony before Congress regarding his role in their dismissal led
to charges that he had committed perjury, a charge that was echoed in a second
investigation into a controversial, White House-promoted
electronic-eavesdropping program run by the National Security Agency (NSA).
On Monday, the president defended Gonzales, a close friend of Bush since the
then-Texas governor appointed him as his counsel in 1994. He charged that
Gonzales' "good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons".
But rights groups said Gonzales' departure is long overdue and should prompt
more vigorous congressional investigations into the administration's record and
current practices.
"Alberto Gonzales will follow Mitchell Palmer as one of the worst attorneys
general in US history," said Anthony Romero, director of the American Civil
Liberties Union, in a reference to the late president Woodrow Wilson's attorney
general who oversaw the sweeping abuses against suspected anarchists and
communists during the "Red Scare" that followed World War I.
"But Gonzales' resignation doesn't put an end to the widespread abuse of
executive powers. If anything, his departure highlights the need for increased
scrutiny and accountability," Romero said.
Gonzales, whose resignation caps a "rags to riches" story that began in a
Mexican immigrant home in Houston, Texas, without running water or a telephone,
attended Harvard Law School and pursued a corporate practice. As a Texas
Supreme Court judge, a post to which Bush appointed him in 1999, he was
considered a moderate conservative.
But as Bush's White House counsel and later as attorney general, Gonzales sided
consistently with the most hardline elements in the administration,
particularly with respect to the "war on terror".
Aside from the prosecutor firings and his questionable testimony regarding the
NSA's surveillance program, he is perhaps best known for characterizing the
Geneva Conventions as "quaint" and "obsolete" - an opinion that helped lay the
legal groundwork for aggressive interrogation of terrorist suspects and their
detention at the US naval facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
According to recent accounts, it now appears that those opinions were based
less on Gonzales' own independent inquiry than on the work of several key
administration lawyers, such as John Yoo, currently at the law school at the
University of California at Berkeley, and Cheney's counsel and chief of staff,
David Addington, who were closely associated with the far-right Federalist
Society.
The society is a lawyers' group that has argued that the executive branch of
government should be accorded near-absolute powers in conducting wars and that
has generally been hostile to treaties and international law that constrain US
power abroad.
Regarding Gonzales' departure, Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based
Center for Constitutional Rights, concluded, "Until we get rid of the entire
cabal, which includes Bush and Cheney, that has engaged in torture, offshore
prisons such as Guantanamo, violations of the Geneva Conventions and
warrantless wiretapping, there is little to celebrate in Gonzales' resignation.
Guantanamo continues, as does torture, wiretapping, secret CIA sites,
rendition, and illegal trials."
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
